Having a recent experience using a Seagate USB drive that wasn’t recognized by True Image I find myself in a position where I need a replacement for my Maxtor Model 3000LS (60 GB) drive due to capacity. This drive has worked well by the way. Given the failure of the Seagate assembly (I didn’t have time to record the model number as I was under pressure to get the system running) I’m looking for recommendations that should work and are available in the USA. I recognize that the chipset is an important consideration here but unfortunately chipset identification does not appear to be available in the specifications for commercially available drives. Additionally there doesn’t appear to be a way of contacting Seagate. This will most likely influence my purchases in the future. I don’t want to purchase a drive and find that it’s not compatible and be forced to return it. This is not cost effective/productive for me or the retailer.

From some of the very knowledgeable posters here I understand that the NEC chipset is a good choice. I am probably looking at a size of 200 GB or greater. The drive can be a commercially available assembly (preferred) or a high quality box to which you add an IDE drive (SATA is not an issue). My question then becomes this:

Does anyone know of drives or interface enclosures that work with True Image 10 Home? Conversely are there assemblies that are not workable?

Yes I think this is something a lot of us need to know. I have ordered true image and now in the market for an external drive. I have never heard about software that will only work with certian hard drives. At least this should be an important note somewere.
Seagate seems to have the best rep for dependability and at least on the internal drives has the best warrenty. Hard enough to find a external drive with good user reviews on places like CBET.
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The make/model of the hard drive itself isn't the issue. If there is a problem, it's likely due to a combination of the motherboard's USB sub-system and the external enclosure's USB to IDE (or SATA) bridge chipset. Some USB bridge chipsets perform poorly when transferring very large data files such as TI images. One bad byte of data will cause TI to report the image as corrupt.

Combination of computer and the drive do play a role, as I've learned from the posts here.
That said, using a Toshiba Satellite laptop, XP home SP2, and Maxtor One Touch III, 200gig external USB drive TI v10 works fine. Both from Windows and the CD mode.
Just make sure to skip whatever software Maxtor puts in - I think it was Restrospect. You don't have to uninstall anything, nor format. The drive is NTFS format as delivered. No drivers, can be named, always recognized.

I have ATI 10 and Seagate USB 300 Gig one touch external drive, the seagate external drive comes with Bounce backup software which I read some people had problems. The one touch is when you use the Bounce software, I did the backup useing acronis. Everything went smooth, even validated the image without my intervention.

I know these kind of WFM responses don't help much but I can't help but chime in with two separate accounts of success with SEAGATE. Seagate USB EXT HDD (80G 2MB cache + 160G 4MB cache) both seem to work flawlessly with TI 9.0.0.2337. I do restore from a BartPE (ReatogoXPE) Windows CD. This TI build both in real Windows and BartPE is solid and I doubt I will budge anytime soon.

I'm using a Western Digital 250GB(My Book) external USB drive with Acronis TI10 Home to back up my internal C: drive which is a WD 80GB, on a Dell 8400 using XP Pro SP2+ installed, back-ups & recovery work flawlessly when using the Recovery CD created with Acronis TI either 9 (CD) or 10 (CD)

I greatly appreciate the responses from everyone. Thinking back about the experience I had, I do recall that it was a very old Micron PC dating back to August, 2000. The interface was USB 1.1 and perhaps the motherboard chipset played a role here. At the time I was under severe time constraints to get the PC repaired and didn’t take the initiative to record the Seagate model number that gave me trouble. It was a new drive however.